The redesign of the Broad! website. Okay, so this is totally cheating and a shameless plug, since the Broad! redesign is what I spent my afternoon doing. But… but… it’s so pretty and stylish and professional-looking! Go on, go look at it. Scroll over the About tab. Do you see that submenu? Do you?

I did some thinking about home today. I haven’t found a dentist or doctor in my area, so I came to my hometown for the day and stayed at my parents’ while they were on vacation. Strange, to walk around the darkened, empty house at night. It’s not as though I have never been alone in a house — for someone who lives with three roommates, I’m alone in my apartment surprisingly often — but I couldn’t recall being alone overnight in that one. The only bed left is theirs; they sold mine some months ago. I slept on my father’s Tempurpedic pillow. Comfortable, but strange. But of course I slept well.

I need to get surgery on my head, the doctor says. But this is nothing to worry about, she told me; I do not have skull cancer; that is not even a thing.

Afterward, I went for a drive because I could. Driving, just to drive, felt wonderful. I must have missed it more than I realized. (And my mom’s car is brand new, which doesn’t hurt.) I drove around and through my old neighborhood, went to see the house I lived in my first twelve years. We lived on the right side of a white condex that looked pretty much identical to three-quarters of the other houses on our street, which was paved with purple gravel and terraced, so each house had a hill in the backyard. The street has been repaved in the past dozen years; the gravel is gone. The house looks much smaller and duller than I remembered; the dog pen has been disassembled and leant against the shed. They have boarded up our side porch. When you drive up, you can see a plastic toddler’s playground in the back. I was happy to see the shutters are still pink. Do my old neighbors still live on the other side? Two years ago, they did. It’s difficult picturing them anywhere else. It’s been half my lifetime and I still imagine us all sitting on the shared stoop, or winding up the tire swing so it spins like crazy when you let go, or kicking [redacted]’s shitbox car in the driveway.

I had forgotten the sheer number of trees, how they bend over the road to form a tunnel. A ceiling of leaves. Made, and makes, it almost impossible to see the sky as you drive down the perpendicular road, at least until you reach the dairy farm. But the cows are all gone now, of course. The farm went out of business and sold the cows when I lived in the neighborhood, and that was a dozen years ago.

The trees were overwhelming, in a good way. I drove another hour just to see more trees. For all its flaws, and all the reasons I so hated that town when I grew up there, it’s beautiful. That surprised me. In spite of all the time I spent hating my hometown, hardening myself against the boredom and nature and smallness, I really loved that neighborhood. (Once, when we were making apple crisp, I told Rachel about the apple-peeling competitions my mom would have with our neighbor. She turned to me and stared. “Where did you grow up, Pleasantville?” And it seemed like it, in some ways, it did.)

In my fervor over my new life, I think, I have neglected some people back home. I must do better. I will be better.

Tonight I went with a friend (hereby called the Girl on Fire) to something she calls “spinjam,” where a dozen or two dozen people gather together in a field and practice poi, among other things (e.g. contact and traditional staff, metal fans, juggling). The Girl on Fire specializes in poi; I tried the poi, the staff and a weighted red stick on a string. I’m not sure if spinjam is my thing, but it was pretty amazing to see everyone doing theirs. After the sun went down, some people soaked the weighted ends of their poi in fuel and lit them on fire.

I realized, during this experience, that I am incredibly lazy. (I wasn’t always. I’m not sure what happened.)

Last summer was my Summer of 2011: Time to Be Bold campaign. This year, the summer will be 2 Bold 2 Furious. Thusly, an official Start of Summer 2012 to-do list:

Learn advanced Photoshop.

Learn basic CSS.

Learn basic JavaScript.

Learn how to do something in Excel beyond, like, typing stuff in boxes.

Release Broad! #2 already.

Find hobby that I am as passionate about as the Girl on Fire is about poi.

Hip-hop? Tango?

Archery?

Take far more baths.

Read more (and actually complete the book — no more reading three books at a go).

Finish that fucking story already.

Swim.

Go paintballing.

Choreograph new burlesque routine; put together costume.

Be more adventurous in cooking.

Throw dinner parties.

Submit to litmags for publication.

Be the best aunt ever (i.e. buy her safari-themed baby things, read her books about magic and heart and feminism, talk to her in a normal human voice, pinch her tiny chubby cheeks).

For breakfast this morning I ate an avocado breakfast panini, or, as I like to call it, an “Egg Nacho Panini.” Yeah, be jealous. (Oh, and happy Passover! or Easter!)

Ingredients:

white bread

shredded nacho cheese

avocado, chopped

red onion, chopped

fried egg (with dill)

baby spinach

Results:

Not as good as I had hoped; not enough red onion, maybe. In retrospect, I was in a mood for something spicier. More flavor needed. Maybe feta? Crushed red pepper? I’ll make it again, though. It’s still got avocado and cheese in it, so, duh.

Sometimes you have the intention to make avocado breakfast panini you found on the Internet, but somehow by the time you get home it’s 9:12pm and you’re starving and the idea of cooking an egg and slicing up an avocado in ADDITION to grilling a sandwich seems waaaaaaaay too much time before you can eat, so you throw every cheese in your fridge into the sandwich instead. Bam. Oh, and you burn the sandwich because you’re busy writing a blog post instead of watching the George Foreman. So your sandwich looks like this:

Ingredients:

“country white” bread, whatever the hell “country white” means

American cheese, 2 slices

feta

shredded nacho/taco cheese, however much you want

Results:

Cheesy! Duh. Super delicious. The individual cheeses are not terribly easy to distinguish once they’ve melted together. I’d say that it tasted like boxed macaroni and cheese, actually, if you had bread instead of pasta. So if you like the idea of a mac and cheese sandwich, this is the one for you.